Critical Essay by Beverly Hahn

SOURCE: “The Duel,” in Chekhov: A Study of the Major Stories and Plays, Cambridge University Press, 1977, pp. 178–205.

In the following excerpt, Hahn describes “The Duel” as “novelistic” in form and method, explores its theme, and compares the work to the fiction of Tolstoy.

But life is never a material, a substance to be moulded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my inept theories about it.